Conventional information processing technology has employed electronics technology in which use is made of electron flows and photonics technology in which photon flows are utilized. Recently, in contrast to this, discussions have focused on the possibility of realizing an “atomic circuit” in which controlled flows of atoms are coherently operated on a substrate. Like the development of electronics or photonics in which employed is sophisticated control of electrons or photons, such an atom control technology will be potentially developed as a new information processing technology which may be referred to as “atomtronics.”
In particular, particles such as atoms or molecules for use with this technology have a larger number of degrees of interior or exterior freedom resulting from their complicated structure as compared to electrons or photons. Accordingly, the establishment of the technology in which such particles are coherently controlled for use may be expected to bring profound effects on quantum information processing, quantum computing, ultimate measurement and so forth in the future (e.g., see the document: Donatella Cassettari et al., “Beam Splitter for Guided Atoms”, Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 85, pp. 5483-5487 (2000)).